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How Beanie Babies Taught My Students To Read

Mrs Vs Chickadees — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 23:46:00 +0000

Teaching kids to read is by far the hardest task I’ve ever encountered as an educator. That is of course until I started using Beanie Babies in my daily reading instruction. Below is how I created a sense of enthusiasm and excitement within my little learners, while simultaneously teaching them the most important reading strategies necessary.

So here is how it works. Each Beanie Baby represents a specific reading strategy that is necessary to decode tricky words. The Beanie Babies are slowly introduced, starting with the easier decoding skills for non-readers and moving towards the more challenging skills. I refer to them as our “Reading Buddies” and students know that they are here to help us.

When a new strategy is taught and modeled, the Beanie Baby comes out. From that point forward you can keep it visible during Guided Reading lessons to serve as a visual reminder for students.

My class absolutely loves our Reading Buddies. They get so excited to use them and to master them so they can meet even more. It creates an immediate sense of excitement towards reading. The Reading Buddies we use are Eagle Eye, Lips the Fish, Stretchy Snake, Chunky Monkey, Tryin’ Lion, and Skippy Frog.

Keep reading to see what each Reading Buddy teaches students.

Eagle Eye teaches students to look at the picture clues to help figure out the word. This skill is necessary for students with limited letter sound knowledge. It allows them to use illustrations to support their reading.

Students who would rely on this strategy are typically reading books that follow a pattern. For example, their text may read like this; “I see a cat. I see a dog. I see a frog.” Once they have mastered the pattern, they can rely on the pictures on each page to figure out the unknown word.
If you’re looking for more ways to incorporate Eagle Eye into your groups, check this out.

Lips the Fish teaches students to look at the first letter and get their lips ready to make the sound. This skill is great for children who have learned their letter sounds individually but aren’t quite ready to start blending them.
This is an important skill because it builds upon Eagle Eye. For example, if the tricky word is “plane” and they look at the picture to help them, they might say “airplane.” However, Lips the Fish encourages them to use the initial consonant to correctly decode the word.
If you’re looking for more ways to incorporate Lips the Fish into your groups, check this out.

Stretchy the Snake teaches students to stretch out the word by making the sounds of each letter. This skill is great for students who are ready to start manipulating and blending sounds together to read words.

Chunky Monkey teaches students to look for chunks in the word. This skill is great for students who are blending sounds in CVC words and showing an interest in sounding out longer words. For example, they may not know the word “small” but if they can read “all” and add the “sm” sound to the front, they can now read the word in its entirety.

Tryin’ Lion teaches students to try a word and ask “Does this make sense?“ This skill is good for students if they have tried all the previous strategies and they still can not figure out the word. It important that they are focusing on choosing a word that fits with the other strategies (the picture matches, has the same initial consonant) and makes sense within the sentence.

Skippy Frog teaches students to skip the word and read the rest of the sentence, and then go back to it. This is a last resort, a “when all else fails” reading strategy, BUT it can be successful, and it can be helpful for students!

So there you have it! Remember, you shouldn’t be teaching these whole class, because the strategies are dependent on the reading abilites of the student. You should be working on these with small groups. Some groups will be working on Eagle Eye while others are continuing to move forward with strategies. Make sure to progress monitor and take anecdotal notes so you know which students and groups are ready to meet their new buddy!

I hope you find this post helpful, remember to Pin this image below so you can refer back to it at any point in the year:

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5 Time Saving Tips for Teacher Moms

Mrs Vs Chickadees — Sun, 13 Aug 2017 19:33:00 +0000

Being a mom is A LOT of work, it is a job that never ends…and sometimes I feel the same way about teaching. So when these two worlds collide, it can seem overwhelming, or worse, as if you can’t give 100% to both areas of your life. Below is a list of 5 simple ways to help you be a rockstar mom and teacher 100% of the time!

Every Sunday I check the upcoming weather for the week and pick out 5 outfits accordingly. I steam them with my Joy Mangano Steamer and hang them in the front of my closet so they are ready to go. I am seriously obsessed with my steamer. It heats up in a few short minutes and my clothes are wrinkle free with very minimal effort. This process makes my mornings WAY easier and allows me to sleep in a few minutes later each morning.

I also spend some time on Sunday prepping my breakfast and lunch for the week. I’m a creature of habit so I tend to eat the same exact thing everyday, which makes planning easy. I eat yogurt for breakfast and a salad for lunch. To prevent my salads from getting soggy throughout the week I peel, cut and dice the goodies (cucumbers, tomatoes, chick peas, etc) and store them in the fridge in a Tupperware. Then I portion out lettuce in 5 separate Tupperware. Each night I simply take out the Tupperware of lettuce, add some of the goodies and I’m good to go. I keep a bottle of salad dressing and a box of plastic utensils at work. This is a super time saver.

Dinner is a whole other battle. Between being exhausted and having a toddler who wants to be entertained all the time, I have very little energy or time to dedicate to a meal. That is why I LOVE my Instant Pot. I can cook anything (no joke) in a matter of minutes. My favorite part, I can cook frozen meat in it! I am the queen of forgetting to defrost meat, which often left me in a panic and making pasta yet again. Not anymore! With an Instant Pot you can literally put meat directly from the freezer in the pot and have a delicious meal in around 20 minutes! Oh and did I mention that it requires zero attention….you set it and forget it. I put all the ingredients in and walk away to tend to my son. The pot beeps when it’s done and dinner is served!

Taking work home when you are a teacher is almost inevitable, but plan your best to avoid this. Create a schedule for your prep and lunch times that is realistic and stick to it. Here is a peek at my prep schedule tasks that allow me to take home little to no work each night.

Monday-Tuesday: Lesson plan for following week

Wednesday: Gather originals for copying, and take out any center materials that need to be prepped

Thursday: Make all photocopies for the following week. **I highly suggest you don’t wait until Friday to do this just in case the copy machine is jammed, broken, or just not cooperating**

Friday: Sort materials for the following week, create any anchor charts you will need, have centers ready to go

My preps are 45 minutes long, and after dropping students off, checking my mailbox and using the restroom I’m only left with about 30 minutes of work time. I stay focused and avoid distractions in order to get this work done. I also arrive at work significantly earlier than students and use my mornings and lunch time to complete these tasks. I’d rather work super hard during the day than bring work home.

And here is my absolute number one piece of advice. Make dry shampoo your best friend…no joke. I used to wash my hair everyday, which just tacked on the minutes to my morning routine as I either had to dry it, straighten it, curl it, or whatever the hell I decided to do that day. Then I found dry shampoo. Before I knew it my hair was trained to adjust to not being washed daily, and the dry shampoo kept it looking clean, smelling fresh and styled! I wash my hair only twice during the work week. This is probably my biggest and most favorite time saver, because curling my hair at 5am is not fun at all. There are about a million on the market but my two favorite are Batiste and Big Sexy Hair.

Bastiste is great when you want your hair to continue to feel clean. It smells good and leaves my hair soft and manageable. I especially like the one for brown hair because it leaves less of that white residue.

Big Sexy Hair is perfect when you want more texture and hold to your hair. It does leave a gritty feel but it also gives a ton of volume. If you are someone with fine hair and struggle to style it because of that, try this dry shampoo.

These are just 5 easy ways we can make our lives easier and make the most of our time as teacher moms. I hope you find this helpful! Don’t forget to pin this image below so you can refer back to this post whenever you need:

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The Who, What, When, Where & Why of Progress Monitoring

Mrs Vs Chickadees — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 15:33:00 +0000

When I first started teaching, I wasn’t very comfortable with progress monitoring. I didn’t know where to start, what materials to use, or how to collect and store data. This obviously led to a lot of pitfalls in my teaching abilities. Creating groups was difficult, writing report cards took an insane amount of time, my IEP reports were vague, and much more. I quickly realized that if I wanted to use data to drive instruction, I had to begin collecting it from day one. Since then, I have worked tirelessly to perfect my progress monitoring tools and assessments. I have seen a tremendous increase in my students learning, the more I perfected my data collection process. It is directly connected to students success. So here are some of the things I have learned during my progress monitoring journey.

Progress monitoring is a term used to describe assessing students in a way that allows you to track their growth in specific areas. By progress monitoring, an educator can see specific areas of growth and areas of need for individual students and/or whole group.

Progress monitoring should be the number one component of your teaching. Below are some of the ways progress monitoring will help you as an educator.

Understanding Student Abilities: By collecting data on each student you can get an understanding of their academic abilities. It will help you track trends for students. For example, student A may have a strength in math but struggles with phonics skills. Or student B is great with memorizing skills but struggles to apply them out of isolation.
Tracking Progress with Grade Level Skills: Backwards planning is important when thinking about progress monitoring. Ask yourself: Where do you want your students to be at the end of the year? What skills should they have been exposed to and have mastered? After you have fleshed out these responses, find assessments that target these skills. From the beginning of the year, test students on this, even if you haven’t taught it yet. This will help you track progress. You will be able to see which students have mastered specific skills and can move on, and which students need targeted instruction for certain skills. I use this baseline bundle to help me track a full years worth of growth all in one spot. It is perfect because as a special education pull out teacher, I service students in grades k-2.

Data Driven Instruction: After all of your assessments have been completed, take a closer look at the results. Look at them on an individual level and on a whole group level. Use this data to drive further instruction. Specific things to look for include:

Which skills are the class as a whole struggling with?
Which skills have the class as a whole mastered?
Which skills should you focus on next?
Which skills need some more time and can be spiraled into centers or word work stations?
Which students are ahead and need to be challenged?
Which students are struggling with basic skills and need small group intervention?
Which students are not making growth?
Which students should be flagged for RTI?
How can you use this information to differentiate lessons, homework and future class assignments?

Creating Small Groups: Do you have small groups during the day? Think about what you are targeting in these groups and then use the data collected to appropriately place students. For example, during center time I work with a small group to focus specifically on phonics. These groups are determined by looking at my data, and I also use the data to determine which skills to practice with them.
Flagging Students for RTI: If you are testing students on the same skills and notice that they are making little to small progress, you must begin intervention with them. Similarly, students who are falling behind in meeting classroom expectations should be flagged for intervention.
Flagging Students for Evaluations: Have you provided RTI within the classroom and still see little to no growth? Continue to collect data on these students and reach out to other professionals within your building about next steps. This student could qualify for pull-out services, and if these next steps are not successful, starting the evaluation process may be beneficial to them.
Writing Report Cards: Writing report card comments can be a challenging task, but it is our responsibility to be clear, specific and helpful in our comments to parents. If you are progress monitoring throughout each marking period, you can simply refer to this data in your comments. Telling parents that their child knows “most of their sight words” isn’t a useful comment. However, telling them that their child knows “70 out of 100 sight words” helps parents have a better understanding of their students academic standing.

Writing IEP Reports: If you are responsible for writing IEP reports, or providing your special education teacher with information on a child, having concrete data and numbers is very important. We are our students advocates so we must be knowledgeable on their growth and their struggles. By referring to your data, you can easily paint a very clear picture of your student.
Holding Conferences: Parent Teacher Conferences can be an uncomfortable situation, especially if you aren’t prepared. Collecting data and having evidence of growth and areas that are challenging, will make the task easier.

Progress monitoring should happen from week 1. You want to utilize every day of the school year to help students grow. In order to do that, you have to have a sense of where they are and where they need to be. Though the use of different assessments, you should be collecting data consistently throughout each marking period. Additionally, if you are using a baseline assessment throughout the year to monitor growth in specific skills (the same assessment multiple times), then you should conduct that at the start of the year, and at the end of each marking period. This will allow you to see just how far they’ve come each marking period.

If you service students then you should be progress monitoring. Whether you are a general education teacher, special ed teacher, resource room teacher, etc. Anyone who is responsible for helping students grow should be tracking their growth and using the data throughout the year.

This is tricky, especially if you are a general education teacher with a class of over 20 students. Ideally, you want to provide your students with a quiet, test taking environment when progress monitoring. If you are doing a whole group assessment then this is easy. However, if it is a one on one assessment, choose times of the day that are the best for this. Make sure the rest of the class is doing independent work. Establish guidelines about what the other students should do if they have a question or a need, in order to avoid interruptions. If you are blessed and have a Teacher Assistant in your room, utilize them to help the rest of the students while you work one on one with a child. Remember, you want to set your students up for success, and a quiet classroom will do that for them.

I hope you find this post useful and I hope it gives you confidence to start the progress monitoring journey!

Make sure to pin this image so you can refer back to it throughout the year:

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